Article 3WQKW Austerity, outsourcing and English councils in crisis | Letters

Austerity, outsourcing and English councils in crisis | Letters

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Thatcherite ideology, incompetence and the abolition of the Audit Commission have all contributed to local government failures, readers suggest. But there's good news from the London borough of Haringey

Aditya Chakrabortty's excellent piece (The councils that embraced austerity will cost us all dear, 13 August) builds on an earlier one by Patrick Butler, who pointed out in 2012: "Outsourcing a local authority in its entirety is a long-held Tory municipal fantasy, first articulated by Margaret Thatcher's local government minister Nick Ridley in the late 1980s." Large Tory-run authorities in Cornwall, Suffolk and Barnet had "embarked on their own high-profile versions of the Ridley model, claiming that impoverishment gave them no choice but to pursue large-scale privatisation".

However, the idea of smashing up and reshaping the public sector had its roots in Tory thinking well before Cameron and May or even the late 1980s. Ridley, appointed by Thatcher "to head a policy group on the nationalised industries" in 1975, had chaired a similar group under Ted Heath in the late 1960s which concluded that there was "a very strong case for embarking on a course of gradually dismantling the public sector".
David Murray
Wallington, Surrey

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